A year of gamedev experiments.

Day 82 - GDC 2017 Postmortem

The Drive to Attend

Let’s see: Day 80 was December 3rd, Day 81 was February 1st, this post is being published in early
May. To say I haven’t had much time for game development lately would be a bit of an
understatement. The day job has become less enjoyable, less stable, and more demanding of my time.

I hadn’t been to GDC since 2012, and felt very much in need of the energy that I had alays received
from it. So as the end of “early bird” pricing for GDC approached, I took a peak at the company
finances and saw there was just enough money to cover it. So I renewed my membership in the IGDA
(to qualify for the discount), purchased an all-access pass, and booked my hotel and flight.

Minimally, it would at least be a week away from the day job, in the company of interesting folks.
Optimally, I would also make some contacts and gather some information for my continued pursuit of
a job in the industry.

Unfortunately, it meant cancelling my plans to attend PAX East this year.

Cheap and convenient flights are not exactly an easy thing to find, but I did have decent luck; I
only had to run through an airport once (O'Hare, to make my tight connection after my first flight
was delayed).

The same goes for hotels, at least in San Francisco during GDC week. I wound up at the
Serrano near Union Square. For the price, the room was
certainly…cozy. I’ve definitely been spoiled by hotel prices in the Midwest, and was expecting
more. I’d bet that these rooms originally did not have individual bathrooms, and that much of their
space was cannibalized in adding them.

I shared the room with an old gamedev friend who had moved out to LA, which made it even more
uncomfortable, but we made the best of it. Some breakfast vouchers for the attached restaurant
were included, for the occasions where we were both awake for breakfast at the same time. :)

My flight had me landing in San Francisco around noontime. It’s my tradition to walk across the
Golden Gate Bridge whenever I’m in town, so I dropped my luggage off at the hotel and headed over
there. The weather was nice, and I was certainly up for stretching my legs after the long plane
flight.

The most direct route by foot is about five miles from Union Square and that end of the bridge,
and I certainly didn’t take the most direct route. My shoes are old and my legs are older, and I
was definitely feeling every step by the time I trudged up the hill to the welcome center. Another
two miles to Vista Point on the Marin County side, and I knew I wasn’t walking back to the hotel.

Luckily there are tour busses everywhere, and I only had to pay a few bucks to hitch a ride with
one as far as the Chinatown gate. Then a few blocks over to Moscone to pick up my badge, say “Hi”
to a couple of UK friends, and back to the hotel with enough blisters to make the week interesting.

Sessions I Attended

Digital distribution removes a lot of the hurdles for software-only indies; but once you have
special hardware, there’s a whole new set of issues. I didn’t spend much time in the expo hall,
but a lot of that was in the alt.ctrl.GDC area;
some games you just won’t ever have a chance to play at home.

Yes, build the tooling necessary to do special events on your live games with minimal dev
involvement. With my background this seems obvious, but I can certainly understand it being a very
useful lesson to new studios.

Free lunch! But also an interesting discussion. Lots of disagreement between the panelists, mostly
due to the very different worlds in which they work. (Not only is the games industry not one
monolithic environment, but neither is “Indie”.) Was very amused that they managed not to mention
Amazon at all. :)

Evil, evil presentation! It made me go home and spend a significant number of hours ranching slimes.

Seriously, a nice overview of how a simple set of behaviours, when allowed to interact, can lead to
some very interesting situations. And especially how players can anthropomorphize the characters,
seeing more complex behaviour than actually exists.

Suffered greatly from the short time slot; feels very much like an hour or more of content stuffed
into just thirty minutes. Kate Compton did an admirable job trying to cover it all, but really
should have been given more time.

Another one to make me want to play the game being discussed. Different from the Slime Rancher
talk, involved making the characters believably human using planning and context-aware dialog.
I definitely need to keep on this one.

Still a great film, even if it suffers from all of the endings being shown in sequence instead of,
as it was originally shown, in three separate theatres. A great one to watch with a bunch of game
developers. I definitely hope GDC Movie Night continues to be a thing.

Interesting, but not a lot of useful info. Arguably more about Ingress that Pokemon GO, as well,
which wasn’t a bad thing. Mentioned the traffic spike to roughly 50x what they expected, but not
how they handled it (or failed to).

I don’t go to a lot of sponsored sessions, but since I’m doing a lot in the Amazon ecosystem, this
was pretty interesting. As is natural, Amazon appears to be bundling their existing services with a
specialized front end to make it useful to game developers.

The handling of QA in the games industry has always been of particular interest to me. I’m happy
every time I see some movement away from the strictly disposable manual Tester philosophy. In this
case, it’s the splitting of the QA group into Analysts and Testers; specialization to a particular
component (Audio, Narrative, etc); working closely with devs. My favourite quote: “If HR is
selling QA as a foot in the door, tell them to stop!”

Great look into how AI can be handled in a very content-heavy, expanding, moddable strategy game;
FSMs and behavior trees would be huge, so they go more data-driven: triggers, scripted weights
modified by those triggers, some randomness. Very interesting stuff, but I was curious about how
they handle testing these things, and this talk at least didn’t go into that much. I have a note
to go watch the “Behaviour is Brittle” talk in the Vault sometime.

I didn’t get much out of this one; hopefully it was useful for some of those earlier in their
careers. In 2017 I’m not sure many are expecting a purely linear career progression, but it’s nice
to let people know what’s available.